


From River Rainy to River East

by finch (afinch)



Category: Across the Universe (2007)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-20
Updated: 2008-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-01 17:54:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1046822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afinch/pseuds/finch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A brother, a sister, a war, and AIDS. A best friend and two fatherless little girls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From River Rainy to River East

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Iseult_Variante](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iseult_Variante/gifts).



> Gift for Iseult Variante in the Yuletide 2008 Challenge.

Five years gone and nothing left to fight for. The war was over; he was just as lost. Drifting aimlessly through the streets of New York, looking for anything to believe in.

Jude and Lucy were married, with a little girl, living in a small apartment in Brooklyn. Lucy gone back to school and Jude worked graveyard shift at a factory for a few years. Once the baby was born and Lucy had finished school, he'd stayed home with her and started taking night classes.

Occasionally, Lucy and Jude would ask Max why he didn't have a job, or a home, or a sense of anything.

It wasn't easy to explain. It was like everything in his brain was fuzzy- like the world had no colour. It wasn't that he wanted to walk the streets of New York and watch people seem so happy. He wanted to be one of those people. He wanted to be able to have a life.

But that was also it. He didn't know what he wanted to do- hadn't given it much thought. Everything had changed after Vietnam. Even before that, he had been going nowhere fast. How was he supposed to pick up the pieces now? How could he make something of nothing?

He didn't live with Jude and Lucy, but he spent six nights of the week there. New York was better than the quiet place his parents lived. The place he'd once called home. Maybe it was true, you never could go home again. He knows the line is from something important- something he might have read when he was trying to pay attention in college.

College. If he could, would he have done it over? The nights he spends with Lucy, she tells him to go back. Tells him it's not too late, that he and Jude can take night classes together. That he can live in their house with the baby, as long as he gets a job during the day. He wonders sometimes if she trusts him with the baby alone. No matter, as he doesn't trust himself anyway.

The idea festers, sits with him through the end of the summer, through the fall, and finally, when he knocks on their door at four in the morning, unable to move his cold, white hand, does he consider accepting.

He sorts packages, numb hand and all, for UPS 10 hours a day, then meets Jude at the community college for night classes. With some college under his belt, he is able to sign up for everything that Jude is taking- he's still lost with what to actually do with his life. They wake up at five to do homework; Max reads from the Political Science books and they hold discussions while Jude feeds the baby. Jude knows more than he does, can trace patterns far better than he can. Jude writes his papers on public policy; he writes his on the human consequences of public policy.

They aren't opposites, but there is something like attraction. He cashes in his four days of vacation, all at once, at the end of the spring semester. The baby toddles over to him, holds out her hand. Jude is passed out on the pull-out sofa that he is supposed to be sleeping on. When the baby falls asleep to his singing, he places her carefully in the crib and makes his way to the pull-out sofa, sitting carefully on the edge of it. He is only going to watch the gentle rise and fall of Jude's chest, nothing more.

The tranquility puts him to sleep. When he wakes, he and Jude are tangled limb for limb and the baby is crying.

"It was nothing," Jude says, and he is inclined to agree.

"No, nothing."

The next day, after the baby is down for her afternoon nap, they sit on the sofa, books strewed in front of them. They are both addicted to learning, for different reasons. It gives Max something to do, and Jude genuinely wants to be good at it. They reach for the same book and the tenuous tranquility of unspoken promises is shattered.

It doesn't build, the affair. There is no gentle touching, quick kissing; there is something carnal that happens when their hands touch. They knock the small coffee table over in the furor- papers coat the floor, nestling among the shirts, trousers, and belts. They don't settle long on the naked bodies, moving too quickly for anything to settle on them.

It is quick, painful. Sweaty. The baby cries from her nap.

Jude and Lucy fight more than before. Fight over the baby, over finances. Over Max staying in the apartment for so long. Over Jude not working. It takes Max a while, but he realises there is another baby on the way.

He starts calling off work, spending his day with Jude, tucking as much into those short afternoons as he can. When Jude confesses he wants to leave Lucy, Max works overtime to avoid the fight he knows is coming. He has a sense of something now, though he couldn't tell you what that was. He has something to want to live for, someone that is attached to his sister by two children. It would never work, and yet, it is all he wakes up for.

The idea that Jude has been seeking other men doesn't occur to him until he is sent home sick from work on a wet morning in March. There is a man he doesn't know there, and the little toddler sucking her thumb sadly from her play-pen. Jude doesn't notice when he picks up the little girl, quietly takes her out of the house. They go to the park. An hour later, when he comes back and places the tired little girl in her playpen for an afternoon nap, Jude still has not noticed that he is home. He leaves, shuts the door quietly, leans on the wall outside and waits until the man he does not know leaves. Later, he tells Jude not to leave.

He throws himself into his school; a professor pulls him aside and tells him he should write a book about the human consequences of war, telling his own story. At the very least, he should consider writing his thesis about it. He goes home with his essays, lays them out chronologically. It isn't a story of him at all. He is only watching- they are told through his eyes, but he is removed from them. It is a story of Daniel, of Lucy, of Jude, of the people of Columbia University. It is of everyone who has been searching for meaning in madness.

The week he presents his undergrad thesis, five men in Los Angeles have severe pneumonia. He is to graduate with honours. He knows what he wants to do; buys himself a typewriter, sets it up in the living room. Lucy rolls her eyes, tells him he finally needs his own place. His niece falls asleep to the uneven clatter of keys striking paper.

He and Jude still fuck on the days he is home from work; there is a new baby girl, and his niece is just too old to take an afternoon nap when they want her to. Jude has the brilliant idea of enrolling her in an 'educational play-group'. Lucy disapproves until Max offers to write the check. The manuscript is still the most important thing to him; he uses up his vacation days to write- or attempt to. He knows Jude sees other men. They don't talk about it. Max is quietly ok with it, though he wants to publish his book and get a place of his own; get a better job, leave Lucy's world to crumble.

His old professor calls him, asks him if he might want to continue going to school. He didn't think he had much going for him in terms of teaching, but his professor has such high hopes for him. He switches at work, takes the night shift, signs up for graduate classes during the day. There is no time to fuck Jude; with both he and Lucy gone during the day, Jude is left to the men he brings in. Max worries about the new baby, trusts himself more with her than he does Jude. He sneaks home during classes, sings to the baby; wishes he could take her with him wherever he goes.

They live this way until March, when Jude falls ill with the flu and doesn't get better. His little niece comes with him to classes, sleeps quietly in her carrier. When she starts to cry, he nudges it with his toes until she drifts back to sleep again. When Jude gets pneumonia, Max gives him a week to tell Lucy what has been going on.

That night, he takes both girls out for ice cream.

They bury Jude two months later.

Lives go on, something Max knows all too well. His sister has suffered the loss of three loves, all in a row, and asks him to stay. The older girl starts school and the little one still attends his classes with him, playing quietly. The students who do not know him congratulate him on his little girl.

"My niece," he corrects them.

Lucy isn't falling apart, isn't losing herself. When he asks her why, she shrugs. "I saw it happen to you. I have two children. I'll be ok, Max."

She takes vacations by herself, leaves him for the weekend with the girls. The three of them don't mind; the girls play while Max pecks unevenly on the typewriter. He writes of war and loss and the over-reaching affects of war. For the first time, he is writing about himself, about drifting aimlessly through the streets of New York, about finding solace in his best friend, about a disease called AIDS, and about two fatherless little girls.

He writes of survival, of his own. He weaves the tale through unusual paths. When his professor reads the manuscript, he has nothing bad to say about it. Max sends it off to be published, waits in limbo for a letter.

Lucy stops wearing black, joins hands across America, and begs Max not to move out if the book is successful. Everyone thinks they are married, and they laugh it off. They tell the tale of a brother, a sister, a war and AIDS. It is as much Lucy's story as it is his. When the publisher calls and tells him that they're doing a second printing, he hangs up the phone, picks up his littlest niece and tosses her in the air, catching her with his good hand as she shrieks peals of pure, uncontainable joy.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Tamsin for the beta and the hand-holding.


End file.
